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Honey, We Shrunk the Franchises
Designed to roll up new audience members into a bigger cultural wave, the prequels, spinoffs, and extended universes have instead gotten small.
An extension of Frank Herbert’s wild, heady, lore-heavy Dune universe, Prophecy came to HBO on the heels of the significant market success, critical acclaim, and widespread cultural saturation of two enormous movies starring some of the most famous young actors of their generation. Plus each new project has the potential to bring in new viewers who enter the whole franchise ecosystem and should get carried along just like all the characters inside the story, an ever-expanding audience that mirrors the perpetually growing interior logic of the fictional world. The irresistible new-plus-old equation is actually much, much harder to pull off than it seems on paper, and as the novelty of huge franchise TV storytelling has worn off in general, the execution of each individual series now matters in a way it simply did not when House of the Dragon ’s first season became a talky HBO breakout and even Obi-Wan scraped together five Emmy nominations.
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